Cooperation, Decision Time, and Culture: Online Experiments with American and Indian Participants

Abstract

Two separate bodies of work have examined whether culture affects cooperation in economic games and whether cooperative or non-cooperative decisions occur more quickly. Here, we connect this work by exploring the relationship between decision time and cooperation in American versus Indian subjects. We use a series of dynamic social network experiments in which subjects play a repeated public goods game: 80 sessions for a total of 1,462 subjects (1,059 from the United States, 337 from India, and 66 from other countries) making 13,560 decisions. In the first round, where subjects do not know if connecting neighbors are cooperative, American subjects are highly cooperative and decide faster when cooperating than when defecting, whereas a majority of Indian subjects defect and Indians decide faster when defecting than when cooperating. Almost the same is true in later rounds where neighbors were previously cooperative (a cooperative environment) except decision time among Indian subjects. However, when connecting neighbors were previously not cooperative (a non-cooperative environment), a large majority of both American and Indian subjects defect, and defection is faster than cooperation among both sets of subjects. Our results imply the cultural background of subjects in their real life affects the speed of cooperation decisionmaking differentially in online social environments.

Strategic Complexity and the Value of Thinking

“…A few papers find a positive between-subject relationship between response times and success in strategic games. 10 We replicate more cooperation in public goods games, although Evans et al (2015) find a U-shaped relationship, Krajbich et al (2015) argue that the direction of the correlation is not robust to changing the relative attractiveness of the selfish and cooperative actions, Recalde et al (2015) argue that the relationship may reflect mistakes and Nishi et al (2017) find cross-cultural differences. Schotter and Trevino (2014) look at the relationship between response times and threshold strategies in a global game.…”

“…Frydman and Krajbich (2016) find that in a social learning environment people can learn about others' private information from observing their response time. Nishi et al (2016) and Nishi et al (2017) find that in repeated social dilemmas response times correlate with the level of previous group cooperation. Spiliopoulos (2016) studies a repeated 2 × 2 constant-sum game and finds that the winstay-lose-shift heuristic is associated with faster choices.…”

How strategy environment and wealth shape altruistic behaviour: Cooperation rules affecting wealth distribution in dynamic networks

“…In the first round, every individual has a fixed probability ( p C =0 . 7 ) of cooperating which reflects a collection of people who choose to be mostly cooperative initially on the basis of trust, although cultural differences may affect the way in which different people behave[43]. In subsequent rounds, individuals take cues from their strategy environment while deciding whether to cooperate.…”